


Renegades

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Cultural Differences, Ensemble Cast, Family Feels, Gen, Introspection, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-11 20:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12943467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Shorts and studies on the knights of the Kingsglaive. Magic is strong and swords are sharp, but nothing keeps them alive better than each other. [written for #glaiveweek]





	1. empty altitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowe's not a morning person. For more reasons than she's just tired.

Crowe was not an early riser. So she was doomed with the Kingsglaive from the very start.

The struggle to appease her aching brain with the daylight hours had not abated over the years. Her alarm clock was her eternal nemesis. It never wearied, it could not be silenced, it didn’t offer her even a half second of mercy as dawn plunged past her eyelids and set her skull to screaming.

Many a decent radio hit had been ruined by her failed attempts to set the clock to a song in an effort to encourage herself to not hate mornings so much. She’d forsaken a lot of her favorites solely for the crime of pounding guitar riffs through the pillows stuffed around her head.

Mornings sucked, but that opinion stayed strictly between Crowe and her apartment. She could pretend that they weren’t the worst torture ever inflicted upon humanity, so long as she got coffee out of it. And beating Nyx’s ass to be first at the glaive barracks was some decent incentive to get out of bed, too.

Competition and coffee were her truest motivators. In mornings and in life.

Yeah, she had something to prove. People said that like it was some sort of criticism. Like she should be scorned for trying too hard. Like she wasn’t allowed to strive for her own strength. No immigrant should. If the war fodder from Galahd and the surrounding regions didn’t stay downtrodden and in their place beneath the highways and bullet trains at the bottom of the city, they threatened the Lucians that already lived here.

Maybe that was why she hated mornings. Waking up only ever seemed to be another callous reminder of where she came from. And the cluttered mess of her apartment another jab at _who_ she came from. No one who was left.

Mornings were too sobering for the high in her blood where she called fire to her fingertips. The Kingsglaive was as much her opportunity to forget as it was to survive the closed doors of the city. She didn’t want to remember the length of time she’d been alone when she couldn’t find another body beneath her mounds of clothes. She rifled through radio stations just to fill the silence. And she bolted out the front door in her work-out fatigues to find Nyx and race him through the streets as soon as she had enough coffee to face the light, just so she didn’t have to stand by herself in her shitty little space.

Her uniform was her family. Once she put it on and got in line with the rest of the Glaive, she belonged to something. Drautos’s sharp commands shoved out the remorse that clung to that one dark corner of her head. She had Nyx’s slick, silver stare to cut up her resentment for the dawns that left her alone, Libs’s sloping grin to soften the blade of her curses, and Pelna’s stupidly sweet hops up to help anyone with anything to remind her that family was more than the blood she’d lost.

The fire purged whatever she wanted to forget wasn’t there, and her brothers filled up the scorched space left behind. They put ice on the burns with the butt of their cheap beers, gave her a warm plate of spicy skewers to land on when she fell, and a home in the dark shadows of the city.

It was hard to take off the uniform every night when it meant saying goodbye them for the evening. She couldn’t get out of that place where she slept to go home again fast enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also read on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168196206822/empty-altitude)


	2. opened boxes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Birthdays between best buddies.

Libertus forgot Nyx’s birthday a whole of once and never once more. And he treated that lapse in memory as a self-inflicted insult to his own honor as Nyx’s best friend.

He was more pissed about it than Nyx was, that was for certain. He’d never held it against Libs – in fact, he’d even forgotten it himself. Their first year in the city hadn’t exactly helped foster a celebratory mood for any of the days they’d traditionally observed back home. And it wasn’t as if birthdays had ever been a big part of their lives, even before they moved to Insomnia. They had always been tiny, private affairs among family, gifts more often than not being good food and company rather than a shiny new trinket they could unwrap.

Some years, when the two of them were older and working and had money of their own to fuss about spending, they sometimes set aside enough to get each other a little something. Practical gifts, nothing too indulgent. Gifts were always something that they could make use of for years to come – belts, boots, exercise tools, cookbooks.

Being glaives didn’t earn them an extravagant paycheck, but it was a fair step up from bartender and sous-chef. It was enough to consider putting more thought behind each year. And with the amount of infirmary visits that transited between them, the threat of each year potentially being their last was a pretty serious motivator, too.

It was hard to buy for the least materialistic people in Lucis though, even if they could afford to. When either of their birthdays passed, they were usually spent raising a glass to the gifts they’d each lost and no amount of success could buy back and wrap up in pretty paper. And when they were done sniffling and snotting and feeling sorry for themselves at home, they went down to Malbo Smul’s Hut and raised another toast to the gifts they still had.

The best gift that Libs gave him every year was just that: another year. And Nyx tried his damndest every _day_ to give Libs back the same.

They traded colored packages through the tear and crackle of the King’s power, ripping through the atmosphere like the paper they wouldn’t even know how to fold around a box if they did buy something nice. They ate dirt instead of cake and popped spines off of daemons like champagne bottles, blackened blood streaming under the moonlight in place of bright, foaming bubbles.

If they weren’t down at the Hut on their birthdays, more often than not, they were out beyond the Wall. Back to back, drenched in sweat and scourge and the sandy gusts of the Leiden wastes, Nyx watching the West, Libs watching the East while the rest of their contingent slept. Birthdays were spent bumping his head into the back of Libs’s and earning the gift of his annoyed curses and no effort to shake him off. Gifts were hearing his friend’s burly voice after a long night of the Empire’s screeching monstrosities. Gifts were a crappy can of beans passed back and forth between the two of them while they debated which direction the enemy was expected to attack from again.

It was a cold night this year, and Nyx was just released from the medical tent with a fang in his hand that had just been carved out of his arm. He found Libertus on the night’s watch, grinned in relief and victory for surviving the bite that was meant for his best friend, and tossed the fang into his lap.

“Happy birthday, you idiot.”

He’d gotten him another year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also read on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168231679557/opened-boxes)


	3. while i waited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being left behind is the worst when the only person you have to talk to is yourself.

It always felt wrong, being left behind.

It felt as much like a waste as it did a mercy. Whether it was medical leave or vacation days – things that should have felt like a _relief_ , like a reward, even, for a job well done – there was always a scratch of guilt festering beneath his skin as he watched the trucks shrink in the distance instead of the city skyline.

Pelna knew that the feeling wasn’t exclusive to him alone. But it wasn’t something they could talk about. Admitting such a profound sense of shame to which there was no fault was harder than dealing with the silence for it in the first place.

The hardest part of it was being alone. The guilt was as much for the maddening thoughts of “ _what if someone doesn’t come back because you weren’t there to help_ ” as they were for not wanting them to go because he didn’t want to be by himself. He knew that it was selfish of him. That Lucis needed them out there far more than he needed them at their table down at Malbo Smul’s. The guilt was for really not giving a shit about what Lucis needed.

Maybe it was whatever painkillers the medics had prescribed for him that fogged up his loyalty to the Crown when he was abandoned to his own thoughts. Maybe it was just that he had nothing else to do but think too much when he wasn’t alongside his brothers beyond the Wall. Maybe he relied too much on the Crystal’s adrenaline searing through his veins and the crashing blasts of glaives cleaving through the Empire’s daemons to distract him from his closeted resentments.

Rationalizing _why_ and _how_ he felt guilty didn’t make him feel any better. It didn’t make the waiting go by any faster. It just made the beer taste more bitter on the back of his tongue, choking it down around the clots of his thoughts in his throat while he waited.

He waited for Yama to dredge the meats in his secret poultice of spices and sauce. He waited to hear the bark and bombast of Libertus’s voice as he tried to coerce the recipe out of the chef and sneak behind the counter while he was focused on their orders.

He waited and he watched as Yama neatly punctured the cuts of meat and plump tomatoes onto their skewers. And he waited for Crowe to wrinkle her nose and drop her beer to remind Yama to hold the tomatoes on hers. He even waited to hear Luche’s insidious efforts to bribe the chef into sneaking tomatoes somewhere throughout the meal. Just to see if they were really as hazardous to Crowe’s palette as she alleged.

He waited for the aromas of home to blast up from the grill as Yama started searing. He waited for skewer duels between Nyx and Crowe once they’d finished racing each other to shear them clean for tabletop battle. He waited to catch Nyx cheating with little bursts of warp magic and having the film to prove it.

His fingers itched over the black screen of his phone. He had so much photographic evidence of Nyx’s dishonorable antics stored in his gallery. Even more of Crowe’s victorious poses when she bested him. His favorite was her clutching the skewer in her teeth and clapping her hands over her head like a cliché tango dancer.

He waited for the screen to light up with all of their faces, crowded together to fit the frame with cheap beers in hand, tongues twisted, noses wrinkled, and eyes crossed for comical effect. It was hard to appreciate the Crown when it sent these goofballs to a delayed death every day.

A hard slap to the back of his head knocked his black mood out into the dark where it belonged.

“The hell, Pel? You didn’t order for us? Rude.”

Crowe slammed down onto the bench next to him and swiped his untouched beer for herself. Nyx collapsed on the seat across from him, groaning as his back hit the crooked wood. Only the threat of Libs’s ass on his face could coerce him into a sitting position.

“You lucky bastard,” Libertus sighed, waving at Yama through the window – the chef was already adding orders to the grill. “What I wouldn’t have given to have a fractured femur on this mission.”

Nyx’s voice was muffled in his arms where his head was dropped onto the table. “Crowe can break it for you. Too tired.”

“I’m off the clock. Leave a message.”

The aching quiet of the empty bar was quickly filled with whines of exhaustion and war stories and more envy for Pelna’s medical leave than he deserved. He would have gone out, fractures and bruises and all, if they would have let him. He would have gone anywhere, through any agony, just to make sure they came home together like this.

If he scooted a little closer to Crowe on their side of the bench, no one mentioned it when she didn’t punch him away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168266376042/while-i-waited)


	4. quiet fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He never asks for anything, but he doesn't have to. There's always someone to have his back.

Axis didn’t talk much. At least, not at work.

Few knew a great deal about him. Either he didn’t like to talk about himself, or there wasn’t much to tell. Most were too afraid to ask. And it wasn’t because he was the most dangerous-looking glaive among them. He was one of the ones that saw the worst of it – the devastation of Galahd. For all anyone knew, his silence was psychological. That he’d seen things so unspeakable that his voice ceased so he’d never have to say them.

That, or he was just painfully shy.

The man was an enigma, but he was a part of the team. He didn’t need words to prove his worth or show his affection for the ragged little family they’d all created in order to survive. In order to try filling in the cracks where another family used to be.

Each of them were making up for something they’d lost in each and every warpstrike. Every blade buried in the throat of a daemon before its jaws closed on an ally was a small chip at redemption. Every glaive one of their spells saved on the field was another step towards vengeance on the Empire – and another drop of spite for the Lucian Crown.

They looked out for one another without ever asking for help. Some of them were too proud, too guilty, too scared to ask for it in the first place. But they got it anyway. The one thing they all knew without ever having to give voice to it, was that they were alone if they weren’t together. And if they were left to themselves, they would be destroyed.

Which was why Tredd punched the front teeth out of a jerk drunk one Friday night.

“You’ll get a check to cover the dental bill in the morning, jackass.”

It was more than he deserved – and probably more than Tredd could afford – but it was the best insurance he could put down to keep the guy from pressing after them. As well as getting out of there as quickly and quietly as they could.

Axis fisted the paper bag of take-out in hand and hurried out the door with Tredd at his back with a vulpine snarl wrinkling his lips, threatening to bite any hand that reached out to stop them. Once there was a block between them and the bar, the tension in Tredd’s shoulders seeped out into the night. The evening was as purple as the guy’s face would be in a few hours, and the air as red hot as the imprint of his teeth again Tredd’s knuckles.

“Gotta say, not the most attractive bruise I’ve ever had,” he snorted, flexing his hand before slipping it into his coat pocket.

He grinned and loped along the sidewalk next to Axis as if they were on a casual stroll, a complete switch from the savagery on his face a moment ago. And his voice was full of airy notes and raunchy jokes to appease the heavy summer air pillowing them along until depositing them at the steps of Axis’s apartment building.

“Home sweet home,” Tredd sighed, giving the building an appraising look before patting Axis on the back. “I’m off then. And hey, we can practice your left hook tomorrow if you want. Good to have for when nothing else will shut an asshole up.”

Tredd was as impatient as a wildfire, already burning along the sidewalk to his own apartment. It took a few steps for him to stop and turn when he heard the small, short steps scraping along the asphalt behind him. Axis lifted the paper bag they’d come away with and gave it a little shake. Tredd’s smile split through the scar along his cheek.

“Thought you’d never ask, pal! That adrenaline rush really gives a guy an appetite. What do we got?” He flung an arm around Axis’s shoulders and followed him to his apartment as if it were his own, poking and prodding and sniffing at the take-out for a clue as to what was inside.

Grease and gratitude. One sounded much better than the other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168328917562/quiet-fire)


	5. incinerate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luche owes Crowe his life. Maybe he'll save hers...

Crowe saved Luche’s life once. She saved it a lot and he saved hers and Nyx’s and Libs’s and everyone’s, every day. There was an innumerable count of situations that could have ended in somebody being slaughtered if someone else hadn’t been there to intervene.

But there was one time in particular, once where Luche had felt the dread and panic of impending death at its most visceral, and Crowe had ripped it from his skeleton and buried it with the thing that nearly killed him.

When they were at war, when the wastelands beyond the Wall were aflame and the daemons swarmed across the scorched earth, life and death could happen so quickly that they had as much gravity as a breath. A sharp inhale just before tearing into the warp, and a heavy exhale in the dirt on the other side. Life was a blade in hand, death a bullet. Too much happened in the moment to feel either of them. To be grateful for one or despair at the other. Like normal people.

But this one moment that felt like every moment in eternity compounded into one long scream in his brain, he felt it. He felt the profound terror of finality. He had too much time, too many steps to take with steel against the back of his neck, to be terrified of what happened next. To wonder at how badly it was going to hurt when the operative twisted their wrist and slid the blade across the front of his throat.

He’d already done his fighting. He’d already tried and failed and considered every possible way to survive this encounter until his thoughts were emptied of anything but the inevitability of what was about to happen to him.

Nif spies were a common threat to the kingdom, assassins constantly repelled by the Glaive to ensure the safety of the royal family. Luche had been one amongst those honored for their bravery and excellence. But that was when the blades were pointed at the King. He’d never had them snuck up on himself before.

He’d never been the target himself. He’d never had anything of value that the Empire might threaten him for. He just had to be the one on archive duty this one night. He just had to be the one that knew where the personnel files were.

They wanted leverage, they told him in a disguised voice – some Magitek device that warbled their words like radio static. They wanted to try dismantling the King’s elite fighting force from the inside-out to cripple the kingdom’s defenses. He would take them to the files they demanded and then die for it, no matter how many promises the thief made that he would be fine if he just cooperated.

He was weaponless, powerless, the operative had come prepared to encounter a glaive. And with all of his strategies for escape seized under panic, Luche was just counting the last steps to the files and begging forgiveness to the Six for all of his life’s mistakes.

And then, like the penitent flames of the Infernian’s purgatory, he was damned. Damned to a lifetime of devotion to the burnt orange-browns of Crowe Altius’s glare. His soul had been forfeit to the icy steel of the Empire and its deception. She stole it for herself.

The would-be assassin’s arms wind-milled beneath the crackle of the fire, distorted voice a horrible, mechanical screech as the tech curdled and twisted beneath their mask. They stilled as a black, prone corpse on the ground, Crowe’s fingertips outstretched to the licks of flame and bidding them to her will.

“You owe me another drink, Lazarus,” she beamed when a sharp kick to the corpse’s leg confirmed for her that it was, in fact, a corpse.

Years later, when they tried to turn him, when he received the order to condemn her to the same death she spared him from… he owed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also read on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168334999617/incinerate)


	6. no place like home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's hard to keep tradition in a city that doesn't know them.

Winter was a little bit easier.

It was harder not to miss home every other time of the year. There were so many traditions, holidays, and annual festivals lost to the Empire’s scorn. So many relics of ceremony and sacred gathering places were buried underneath the ash alongside the people that celebrated those old rites. Dates familiar only to themselves whispered over Insomnia’s Wall and never landed in the prostrate palms of the immigrants that waited and reached and remembered what they had meant in Galahd.

They remembered the days that honored older gods than Lucis’s Hexatheon, they remembered the days at the end of every season which celebrated the land and all its bounties, and they remembered the days marked for the memories of the islands, paying respects to the people gone before. Spring, summer, and fall brought times to rejoice and to thank and to honor fortunes old and new.

The Empire didn’t appreciate that. They didn’t believe in their “made-up” gods, didn’t leave much of anything for them to harvest for their festivals in the wake of their invasion, nor many elders to lead them in the remembrance of their history. But they left them plenty of dead to honor.

Insomnia was little better. While they didn’t actively try to revoke their traditions as the Empire’s assimilation efforts back in what remained of home attempted, they didn’t welcome them. It was hard, letting go of some, and harder still to keep others alive in the little district they’d been shunned to make for themselves. The yearly festivals they kept were just enough.

Winter was the time for rest. It had always been the quietest time of year in Galahd. There was a bonfire at the end of autumn where they all gathered to bid each other a restful winter with a warm hearth. Then, nothing until the blast and bombast of Year’s End.

Winter’s traditions were different for every family. Almost occult in their secrecy from one clan to the next. Selena used to joke that they were like the black mages of old, all cloak and pointy hats. But there was nothing arcane about any family’s private traditions… Although there was that one time their neighbor’s house lit up like Ramuh’s staff. They were grumpy and singed the next Nyx saw them. No one asked. That was rude.

Insomnia was always wary of the lights and the noises rising up from the immigrant district the few festivals they refused to let pass over their heads without recognition. When the winters came – and they came early across Lucis – they were quiet where the city grew louder. Holidays were much more commercial; political, even. Nyx was sure there was some time-honored tradition to the hysteria of the shopping complexes somewhere in the royal land’s history, but in all the years he’d nearly been trampled on the sidewalk just by passing the entrance to a department store on his way to work, the reasons eluded him. If a shopper shoved him into oncoming traffic for the sake of a sale, would the impact finally illuminate some sacred symbolism to the season for him?

Winters worked better for all of them. They stuck to themselves during the most chaotic time of the year. While Insomnians shopped and stressed and panicked over whoever they had to appease for the holidays, Nyx and his people stayed as close to their homes as work would allow them. And they reflected. They pooled together whatever remained of the traditions linked to their family names and stayed as true to them as they could in the sanctuaries they’d had to make away from home. And he knew that along with whatever prayers and wishes went with everyone’s unique winter rituals, they all shared one great prayer for their homeland. And for each other.

Family names stopped being separate when the family that came with them was reduced down to one. Most of the old Ulric traditions he remembered from his childhood he shared with the only family he had left. Wood-fires and furs had been staples in his home. Now, he invited Libertus and Crowe over to pile under the most hideous, fake fur throws he could find to watch the romanticized movie adaptation of Ifrit’s downfall on his tiny square of a TV.

Libs bought cheap blocks of wood to carve totems for the gods each of their families used to pay tribute to the most. Crowe liked to carve offensive representations of the Empire’s upper echelon. Nyx thought their gods would be very pleased with that offering.

Crowe set a little money aside each year to buy them all a bottle of the most authentic Galahdian whiskey she could find inside the Wall. Sometimes she had it imported. Just one bottle to do just one toast at Year’s End to celebrate themselves. They spent the winter remembering and regretting and rising above the poignancy of their loss. She wanted a tradition where they could just lock the door to whichever apartment they decided on and curse out the Empire, the Hexatheon, hell, even the Crown, if it pissed them off enough one year. They just had a day where they could be unashamed of their bitterness, then washed it out with some strong booze to start the New Year clear.

When they were giddy enough and let their resentments for Lucis burn up under the fire in their palms, they stumbled out onto the streets to watch the fireworks and the snowflakes. Crowe locked her arms around their necks and dragged them down to the Hut for a loose gathering of their fellow revelers.

_And they laughed._

All of them laughed so much on this one day of the year where there was no lost holiday. They’d made one up for themselves, one that was neither Lucian nor Galahdian. It wasn’t made in remembrance or remorse for anything. It was just for them. Just for the people that made it, the people that were still trying, that still had a home amongst each other.

They piled onto the rickety old bar tables outside, slated over with ice and soaking their pants to be mocked later. But no one cared about anything but the laughs. They had no shame. They had lights in the sky and snow in their hair and booze on their breath. And warmth at their sides.

It wasn’t Galahd. But it was home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also read on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168373241782/no-place-like-home)


	7. homebound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nyx serves a drink to an unexpected customer.

They deserved this.

He knew that sounded so self-serving and arrogant without even having to hear himself say the words out loud, but he thought that, really, it was the truth.

They’d spent so long believing that they didn’t deserve anything. They were too mired in their grief, too angry at everything, and too determined to cauterize the memories with the rip and burn of the warp to want anything more than some peace of a mind. Just a good night’s sleep, locking the ghosts outside their doors. Let them haunt the city streets instead of their own bodies.

It had been too long since Nyx had enough quiet to let himself think, since he’d been abandoned by his demons long enough to want anything more than the absence of them. But now, he could finally just _sit down_. Just be still and watch the world rather than race it. He could think back to the start and follow along its jagged edges and have the time to feel every cut like he’d never allowed himself to before. And he knew he wasn’t the only one.

There was a stretch of time after the sun came up, well after they helped each other and the rest of the world recover enough to walk with the King on their own two feet, where the Kingsglaive divided and isolated themselves for an unspoken agreement that they had to _feel._ They had so much time to chase now, so many tears unshed, so much anger unfelt; so many islands within themselves unvisited.

They deserved this time. They had fought as hard for the King of Light as he did for them. They had fought long and tired and ruined from a plague far older than the Darkness that pressed over Eos. They had white scars and black ink that never truly healed before the skin set and smoothed and tried to hide all of the old hurts. They tried to fortify the marks left carved upon their bones so that they could never fall from them.

The bar was for those battlescars.

He’d always missed it. Some days, the craving for his old, humble living had been so unbearable that he fled his bed at two in the morning and just ran the streets of Insomnia until he couldn’t find the memory anymore between the endless alleyways.

It found him now, and this time, he wasn’t afraid to let it. None of them were. And they all had something like his bar. Something that found them when they were afraid to have it and that chased them out into MT firing squads and daemon stampedes and wary Lucian crowds. Now, he saw all the things that they let catch up with them. It was safe to let them in now.

Libertus was the one hooking his arm around Crowe’s neck nowadays, paying back every friendly headlock she’d ever attacked him with in the past. That was whenever she stopped back at the islands. Crowe traveled more than any of them. She wasn’t afraid that they wouldn’t be there anymore when she came back.

Pelna let someone treat him to a drink for a change instead of buying every round himself. He wasn’t afraid of losing their approval anymore. Luche built houses long after everyone had a home. Tredd talked less shit and put his fists to better use teaching self-defense to those that wanted it. Axis talked more and Sonitus smiled here and there.

In spite of all their differences, Nyx hoped that Drautos made it back home. He hoped that Cavaugh was just as beautiful as Galahd.

He hoped that all of it was real. Some mornings, he laid in bed a little longer to let the world sink in. To let him know that he wasn’t still asleep. That the feeling of euphoria lightening his limbs was not a phantom of his dreams.

It was a year or two after the light returned that Nyx knew for sure that this was his life now and he was allowed to have it. Although fewer things felt more like a dream than having the King of Lucis pull up a seat at his bar.

“Listen, just because you saved the world from eternal darkness and decide on my taxes does not mean you get a discount, let’s get that clear right away.”

Insubordination had never let him go, even when he had no more orders to spite. Fortunately, Noctis was far more amused by his impropriety than his commanding officer used to be.

“I’d feel remiss in my duties to the kingdom if I didn’t support small businesses.”

“Small, huh? I’ll try not to feel too insulted.”

Noctis snorted, a smile on his face. Nyx had rarely seen that before. He’d rarely seen the Prince, period. His duties had always prioritized the King and always took him to his throne room or his frontlines, but never anywhere else. The scant occasions he’d met Noctis, he’d always seemed so… lost. Sullen, most people would scoff. Spoiled. Most of Nyx’s countrymen resented the royal family too much to see past it. But Nyx had always seen something kindred in Noctis. Something just as rootless and wandering as the rest of them.

For that, he owed him a good drink. They all owed him a lot more than that.

“What brings His Esteemed Majesty up to my little hovel?” Nyx asked, busying himself with finding a glass befitting the One True King.

“I wanted to find one of you while I had time away from the throne. You were the easiest to track down. You haven’t moved from this spot since you opened, the way people tell it.”

“People talk about me, huh? I’m flattered.”

Noctis smiled, quiet and reserved. Nyx could see thoughts moving behind his eyes like a carousel. Nyx slid him a small drink to help steady them. But Noctis didn’t raise the glass to his lips right away. His hand hesitated around it, brows furrowed as he looked at the reflection of light off of the alcohol. Then, he pursed his lips, lifted the glass, and looked to Nyx.

“I wanted to find you so that I could thank you. All of you. Because I don’t remember anyone ever saying so before. Without the Kingsglaive… I might not have a father. Might not have a friend I was afraid I’d never get back from the Empire. Might not have a lot of things if it wasn’t for you.”

Nyx wanted to dissuade him from the honor. They’d never demanded praise – mostly because they never expected to get it. They all knew that the Kingsglaive was a thankless calling. That it was just a role to fill to survive the merciless city. But Noctis was resolute in his gratitude. He met Nyx’s eye unlike anyone from Lucis ever had before. He looked at him as an equal and his gaze didn’t shy away out of shame or disgust or anything that had alienated them from the kingdom before.

“This is to you,” Noctis said, tipping the glass in a toast. “Would you tell them that? If I never get the chance to?”

“Tell you what. Open a tab for them to put a few drinks on and you’ll be telling them yourself.”

“Deal.”

Noctis downed the drink and failed to keep the shudder from his spine. Nyx tried not to laugh. Noctis rolled his eyes, more at himself than anything. Nevertheless, he politely asked for another and order one more for Nyx himself. The glasses tinked together like the bell chime magic of the Armiger that had both linked them to their fates for so long.

It was so much sweeter sounding in his bar, on his islands, amidst the salty summer air off the coastline, amid the echoes of his friends’ laughter in the stained wood of the bar-top and the reflections of smiles promised to return in the amber bottles.

They’d made it home, at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also read on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/168400875252/homebound)


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